Ethics in Scientific Research

Last summer I was privileged to visit Germany for the first time. It was a very humbling and moving experience to be able to visit Dachau, the first prominent and leading Holocaust concentration camp outside of Munich. The camp was well preserved, and in one of the main buildings of the camp had been erected one of the most fascinating and impressive museums I have ever been to. Accompanying my visit were a flood of emotions: curiosity, sadness, anger, and disgust. One particular section of the museum was of particular interest to me - medical research and experimentation on camp prisoners. 

I learned of some of the most horrific and inhumane experiments one could possible imagine: cutting twins open all the way down the side of their body and trying to stitch them together to make one person; throwing prisoners out of airplanes at high elevations without parachutes to see how their bodies reacted in low pressure environments (meant to help German pilots who have to eject from their airplanes during a dog fight); removing bones, nerves, muscles, and connective tissues without anesthesia and trying to implant them in other prisoners' bodies; and trying to see how long a human could stay alive drinking only salt water, among dozens of others. Tens of thousands of prisoners were killed in these experiments. Obviously, this inhumane behavior is disgustingly abhorrent, and it remains a dark stain in the history of German and in all of humanity. 

One experiment that I learned of has carried with it ethical controversies that exist even today. Camp doctors would submerge prisoners in tanks of freezing cold water for several hours until they were nearly dead, and then take them out and test what worked best to revive them. They would warm them slowly, or quickly, or pour boiling hot water on them, often scalding them to death. Though horrific in nature, these experiments have provided modern medical experts with some of the most relevant, informative information in this field of study.

Not too long ago, Doctor Robert Pozos, the Director of the Hypothermia Laboratory at the University of Minnesota of Medicine at Duluth, attempted to use some of the results of Nazi experimentation in a paper he submitted to have published by the New England Journal of Medicine.  His research is devoted to methods of rewarming frozen victims of cold. After observing as many cases of reviving frozen patients as he could in hospitals and clinics around the world, he came across impelling data from the Dachau experiments that seemed to fill the gap in his own research. Pozos remarked that "It could advance my work in that it takes human subjects farther than we're willing."  He finished his paper and submitted it to NEJM for publication, after which it was flatly vetoed by the Journal's editor.

Obviously, The New England Journal of Medicine, one of the world's leading publishers of scientific discovery, found that because the research was obtained unethically, they would not publish it. This set a major precedent in the scientific community for ethics in research. However, many were of the opinion that while the prisoners' deaths were cruel and inhumane, one cannot change the past. All you can do is make positive change for the future. They argue that not using the data to save future lives would be letting the prisoners die in vain. They argued that to use the information would be to posthumously turn their lives into legends.